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Maemo community is again participating in Google's Summer of Code

The Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers student developers salaries to write code for various open source software projects. Sponsored by Google, they:work with several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together nearly 2500 successful student participants and 2500 mentors from 98 countries worldwide, all for the love of code.maemo.org was involved in 2009, after organisation efforts by Valério Valério. His efforts this year have also resulted in the Maemo community being named as one of the organisations participating. Project ideas will now be submitted which will get whittled down and students allocated.

Ten candidates for March 2010 Maemo Community Council election

It's election time again and this year's Community Council election is more important than any other in the past, due to one word: MeeGo. Elections start on Wednesday, 24th March and run for a week. Eligible voters will receive voting tokens and instructions from Dave Neary. The voting is counted by "single-transferrable vote", meaning that if your first choice candidate isn't going to win, your vote for your second choice candidate is taken into account.The Maemo Community Council is a five-person body chosen by the "Maemo community". The Council's primary purpose is to represent the views and opinions of the Maemo Community to Nokia, and vice versa.Maemo Community Council members are unpaid volunteers who are not employed by Nokia Coporation.Ten candidates are standing (Ryan Abel, Randall Arnold, Andrew Black, Attila Csipa, Andrew Flegg, Andrea Grandi, Cosimo Kroll, Javier S. Pedro, Arek Stopczynski and Steven Yeager). The page below lists summaries of their declarations and links to other various comments and Q&A sessions they've been involved in. Sanjeev Visvanatha is pulling together an extended blog-posting having asked a series of questions of all of the candidates.

Applications

First release of PhotoTranslator application

After an interesting video a couple of weeks ago, showing OCR (optical character recognition) being combined with foreign language translation and the N900's camera, Marko Mattila has announced the first public release of PhotoTranslator:Few weeks ago we released a video about PhotoTranslator application running on N900. Because people were very interested in about getting this application in use, we decided to release an alpha version of the PhotoTranslator. It's available at extras devel repository, but it's in alpha state now, so we don't guarantee that it would work perfectly.As it's in not yet in Extras, care should be taken if installing it.

Sygic Mobile Maps for Maemo Europe available for purchase

Sygic's Mobile Maps application has been long looked forward to for Maemo 5, filling as it does the gap left by the omission of Wayfinder (and the inclusion of Ovi Maps). Turn-by-turn, reroutable, voice-guided navigation is included, and Sygic includes in their press release a video:With the full set of navigation features, multiple user settings, fast route calculation, user-friendly operation and the latest maps situated on-board of the device, Sygic Mobile Maps turns Nokia N900 into a full-featured personal navigation device, and provides forThere have been a few reports of problems on talk.maemo.org, and a full-blown review has yet to be posted. However, both EMEA/Russia and American regions are now both available.

New Twitter client renamed to TweeGo

TwitterBox, an(other) in-development Twitter client for Maemo 5, has been renamed "TweeGo" after a name collision with an iPhone application.As of now it is very alpha with regard to functionality and has not been uploaded to the extras-devel repository yet. There is no dedicated @ reply column, no direct message section and so on but the UI is beautiful. The transitions are slick and the app makes you want to use it. Hopefully it will have much more functionality soon.TweeGo is not yet in the maemo.org repositories and its installation is currently by downloading and installing random debs from the Internet. However, it looks promising, and the landscape of Maemo Twitter clients has expanded: Mauku, Witter and now TweeGo. Such applications seem to be the benchmark for tech-bloggers when evaluating a modern mobile OS.

Desktop Activity Manager allows multiple desktop personas

Stefanos Harhalakis has released an application which allows the Maemo 5 desktop to be configured for different use-cases at different times. He says, anactivity is the set of all desktop widgets, bookmarks and icons along with the background.For example, it is possible to have an activity named "car" where the desktop is customized to be easily accessible while driving without having many icons. Then another activity named "games" to include shortcuts to games. Then another activity named "clean" without any widgets on the desktop in order to conserve battery.Desktop Activity Manager is currently in Extras-testing, so if you are willing to take a chance - and test and vote on the application to get it into the hands of more end-users - you should install it and run it through the QA procedures.

Development

Qt 4.7's "QtDeclarative" may help N900 run MeeGo and Symbian Qt apps with "little or no extra effort"

In a thread on "Cleaning [the] N900 FUD", Quim Gil - Nokia's community manager for Maemo/MeeGo - emphasised that the experimental Qt 4.7 release for Maemo 5 could really ease the transition to MeeGo:We have been discussed that the arrival of Qt 4.6 final & official means better compatibility and longer life for Maemo 5. In this context it's worth mentioning that the Qt team has started packaging Qt 4.7 (with QtDeclarative inside) for Maemo 5. Don't overlook this QtDeclarative since it has all the number for bringing plenty of apps for MeeGo and Symbian that might very well run on top of Maemo 5 with Qt 4.7 one with little or no extra developer effort.Of course, if Qt applications are relatively mobile between MeeGo, Symbian and Maemo 5, this reduces the incentive for Nokia to officially release an end-user supported version of a Maemo 5 successor for the N900. Indeed, it will probably reduce the community interest as well. However, it's worth noting that the Harmattan UI, and the official Nokia applications, will not be available through this mechanism; and that the Qt Mobility APIs have yet to deliver on this cross-platform development dream.

Community

First MeeGo Technical Steering Group (TSG) meeting: Weds, 24th March

The first public TSG meeting of MeeGo's "benevolent dictators" will be held on Wednesday, 24th March at 20:00 UTC. The meeting will be moderated by Quim Gil and Dawn Foster (Nokia and Intel's community managers, and members of the MeeGo Community Working Group), but questions will be able to be put to the participants via a "back channel". The agenda will cover:MeeGo architecture update; MeeGo release plan; Release program setup; Technical Steering Group setup; Community working group proposal; Localization working group proposal [and] Appointments

MeeGo community forums to be powered by vBulletin

After much discussion on the MeeGo mailing lists, the MeeGo forums - equivalent to talk.maemo.org - will be run on the vBulletin platform, and managed by Reggie Suplido. The decision was ultimately taken by the embryonic Community Working Group. Quim Gil said,The reasons for the decision are the proven track of vBulletin and Reggie with http://talk.maemo.org. The integration of Drupal and vBulletin fulfills the Single Sign-on requirement and looks good from a technical and resourcing point of view. The proprietary license is considered a negative aspect but not a blocker or a major factor considering the practical situation with the open source alternatives at hand. phpBB has been considered to be overall on par from a technical point of view, and the open license made it more attractive. However, there has been an uncertainty about who would be able to lead and execute the work. Calum Lind has done a great job promoting this option but due to personal reasons he can't commit right now to work on this. Somehow it was felt that we didn't have the critical mass of supporters contributors we seem to have around vBulletin.The decision to deploy closed source software was met with some grumbles, but discussion has now moved on to what the forum structure should be; which mailing lists should remain (or be moved to the forum) and the design of the forum theme.

Devices

After CNET article, Nokia say "door is not closed" to MeeGo on N900

In a CNET article, an unnamed source at Nokia said that "Maemo on the N900 is not upgradeable to MeeGo". CNET took this as proof that the N900 will not run MeeGo, causing members of the Maemo community - who remembered quotes that MeeGo would be running on the N900 by "the end of the month" from members of the MeeGo Technical Steering Group - to dismiss the whole article. Engadget took the quote to their contacts at Nokia who, on the record, saidthe "the door is not closed" with regard to MeeGo on the N900 -- a final decision has not been made.Of course, a developer distribution running on the N900 is a long way from having a day-to-day usable replacement for Maemo 5. At this point, we simply do not know.

PR1.1.1 finally released for UK firmware users

PR1.1.1, the interim firmware necessary to bridge PR1.1 to the forthcoming PR1.2 (a fairly hefty update) is finally available for users running the UK firmware. Urho Konttori, now in charge of Fremantle delivery, said,ooo... shiny! Finally pr1.1.1 for the brits!

Announcements

Cosimo Kroll (zehjotkah) running for council

Cosimo Kroll has announced he is running for a spot in the Maemo Community Council:I see myself as an interface between the average user and the developers/advanced user, because I understand, what developers/advanced users say, and can translate this into simple language. I can't code myself, so this is the best way to help the community in my opinion.

Andrew Flegg (Jaffa) running for the council

Andrew Flegg has announced he is running for a spot in the Maemo Community Council:Having moved up through each generation, I've tried to be active and involved in all aspects of the Maemo community. The last six months, having stepped back from the council, have given me a new perspective. The biggest issue I've seen is one of communication and clear facilitation. We need to reduce the overhead and streamline community action.Andrew was a member of both the first and second councils, and did not run for the third. Your editor will try to insure his impartiality when covering these elections, despite running in them himself.

Attila Csipa (achipa) running for council

Attila Csipa has announced he is running for a spot in the Maemo Community Council:I'm mostly known for my activities relating to Python and Qt (which was also the object of my talk on the last Summit), but am also a member of the Testing squad and have a dozen or so applications and libraries in the repositories (like AppWatch, QuickBrownFox, PyQt, support libraries for Easy Debian on Diablo, etc).Attila also goes by the nick "attila77".

Ryan Abel (GeneralAntilles) running for council

Ryan Abel has announced he is running for a spot in the Maemo Community Council:I've been involved with Maemo in one way or another since the earliest days of the 770, I love this platform, I love this community, and I'd like to help make it the best it can be.Ryan was a member of both the first and second councils, and did not run for the third.